Chapter Text
“I have a question, Ranboo,” Ghostbur asks one day. The tone of his voice is oddly flat; it’s about as serious as he can manage. “You know Tubbo, right?”
“Uh, yeah, I know him. Why do you ask?” Ranboo answers. They’re… something akin to friends, he likes to think. As much as the president has been friends with anyone ever since Tommy was exiled. He’s very reserved, spending most of his time working or building or signing paperwork or following up with Ranboo and the rest of the cabinet on their plans.
He likes to work as if he isn’t in pain, and he walks with his hands behind his back like that will hide their shaking.
It’s odd, Ranboo thinks, working so closely with someone that won’t admit they’re sick. It’s the worst kept secret in L’Manberg at this point: the bags under the president’s eyes, the pallor of his skin, the way his hands shake when he didn’t get enough sleep the night before. Everyone is aware of it, but no one seems willing to actually talk about it.
He wonders why that is. He wonders if it has something to do with the crater the nation was built on, or the dead men L’Manberg speak about like their names are curses. He wonders if maybe whatever made Tubbo sick can be cured. He wonders if maybe someone already told him these things and it all just slipped through his fingers like every other memory he forgets to write down.
“I was wondering if you know where Tubbo’s skin has gone?” Ghostbur asks, startling him from his thoughts.
Ranboo blinks, trying to wrap his head around the question. “His… skin? Do you mean his burns?”
“No,” Ghostbur shakes his head. “His skin.”
“I… really don’t know what you’re talking about, Ghostbur. Maybe you’re better off asking Fundy?” As soon as the name comes out of his mouth, Ranboo winces. “Or Quackity, he and Tubbo are close. I think.”
Ghostbur tilts his head to the side for a long moment, his eyes far away. “Quackity and Schlatt were friends, weren’t they?”
From what Ranboo remembers, he’s only ever heard Quackity say Schlatt’s name with scorn and revulsion and regret that he wasn’t the one to kill him. “Maybe?” he offers.
“Quackity might know where it is, then,” Ghostbur nods, and begins to float away. “I’ll ask him.”
Later, Ranboo watches from a distance as Ghostbur asks Quackity a question- presumably the same one he asked Ranboo- and he watches as Quackity’s face goes white as a sheet before he shakes his head.
Ghostbur leaves, shoulders sagging, and the question is never brought up again.
-
In the end, despite all the work that was put into it, L’Manberg is destroyed. Ranboo won’t lie and say that he’s going to mourn it. The place was something of a home, sure, but in the end it caused more harm than good. Tore more people apart than brought them together. Hell, Tubbo was probably going to work himself to death at the rate he was going.
Which is why Snowchester concerns him, when he first catches wind of it.
There was a part of Ranboo, towards the end of things, that thought maybe Tubbo was sick from the weight placed on his shoulders. Tubbo wasn’t even elected, the way he understands it. Wilbur just gave him the title of president and then waltzed off to blow his own nation sky high. He didn’t ask for the position, and it was a lot of responsibility to give someone his age. Maybe trying to work under all that pressure was what hurt him.
So Ranboo doesn’t understand why he’s so desperate to try again.
He finds him on the edge of the docks, his feet dangling in the surely ice cold water. Ranboo can’t help the sound that comes out of his throat when he leaps to his side.
“What are you doing?” he asks without thinking.
“Watching the sunrise,” Tubbo lies, his eyes on the water below him and only the water.
“Tubbo, your legs are soaked!” he hisses. “The water’s freezing!”
Tubbo just shrugs. “Is it?” he asks, and there’s something like a smile gracing his lips. The first smile Ranboo thinks he’s seen from him since he left after the Butcher Army, and came back short of breath and unwilling to admit where he’d gone. “Is it really, big man?”
A noise makes its way out of Ranboo’s throat, high and sharp like a whine. “At least go inside and warm up.”
Tubbo’s grin grows as he sighs. “Fine, fine.” He moves to stand and grab the boots sitting next to him, his bare feet slapping against the cold stone of the dock. There’s not a hint of frostbite on his legs. As he makes his way back to the house, he calls over his shoulder, “Are you coming, Mister Worrywart?”
Ranboo isn’t expected back home until much later in the day. In the meantime, he thinks, someone needs to make sure Tubbo didn’t give himself hypothermia.
Tubbo teases him the rest of the night, and Ranboo finds himself matching his smile. Maybe, he finds himself thinking, they could be friends. For real, this time. He’s looking forward to getting to know the real Tubbo, not just President Underscore.
-
Tubbo’s condition doesn’t worsen after that, much to Ranboo’s surprise. Tubbo’s hands still shake, though, and there’s a cough that never seems to go away. Sometimes he’ll stare over the water without blinking for so long that Ranboo wants to press his hand against his forehead and check for another fever.
He’s not entirely sure how much better Tubbo is doing, since he’d made a more concentrated effort to hide his symptoms in L’Manberg, but he certainly smiles more. He roughhouses more, and there’s a life to the way he moves that wasn’t there before.
One day, they’re drinking hot chocolate and looking over Tubbo’s little home when the topic of Schlatt comes up. Ranboo can’t quite remember how they got there, but he knows the way Tubbo’s face falls at the sound of his name is going to stick with him for a while.
“I know Quackity and Fundy compared you to him, sometimes,” Ranboo admits, and watches the way Tubbo flinches. “But I don’t really know who he was, other than a bad president.”
Tubbo laughs without humor. “Yeah,” he sighs. “He was awful. Drank all the time, always smelled like smoke. Yelled a lot. He was the one that exiled Wilbur and Tommy the first time around. He… he had his moments, though. Between the awful parts.” His shoulders are nearly at his ears, he’s so hunched over.
“You don’t have to defend him, you know. You’re allowed to hate him,” Ranboo tries to assure.
Tubbo doesn’t relax at that like he’d hoped. “I know, it’s just… hard to hate someone you heard crying into his drink at three am, you know? I knew him better than a lot of people.”
“You did?” Ranboo asks, eyebrows furrowed. “Is… that when you were a spy?”
Tubbo nods. “He called me his right hand man, right up to the end.” His grip around his mug is white-knuckled. He’s tense, like he’s said something damning and is waiting for Ranboo to berate him for it.
“That sounds awful,” Ranboo says, and Tubbo’s shoulders finally drop.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice almost a whisper as of he’s telling a secret he’s never spoken aloud before. “I didn’t like working with him. I wanted to go home. But I couldn’t.”
Ranboo leans forward to put a hand on his shoulder. “Why not?”
Tubbo smiles, thin and bitter. “He took something from me. He took something I can never get back.”
-
Tubbo gets a fever after that. Ranboo hovers by his bedside while Tubbo looks up at him with hazy eyes.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to call Tommy?” he asks for what might be the hundredth time.
“Yes,” Tubbo reminds him. His voice sounds hoarse and wrung out, even though there’s a faint, fond smile on his lips. “He’s awful with this stuff. He gets so mad.”
“At you?” Ranboo smooths out the wet washcloth on Tubbo’s forehead with a gloved hand.
“Not at me,” he corrects around a yawn. “He’s mad at everythin’ else. Schlatt, mos’ly.”
Ranboo opens his mouth to ask why Tommy would be mad at Schlatt for Tubbo’s illness, but Tubbo’s breaths come even and steady and he doesn’t want to disturb him. He needs the rest.
-
The Bee n’ Boo is definitely an impulse project on their part, but Ranboo can’t say he isn’t looking forward to it. Ever since they brought Michael home, there’s been a steady rhythm to his and Tubbo’s relationship. They work well together. Really well. Breaking ground is going to be an adventure, he’s sure.
“Tubbo?” he calls.
“One minute!” comes the reply. When Ranboo looks over his shoulder, Tubbo is bent over further back on the prime path, his hands on his knees as he wheezes. “You can go ahead and start!”
Ranboo tries to keep watch on Tubbo from the corner of his eye as he plunges his shovel into the ground. He’s struggling to catch his breath. And he’d been doing so well today, too. Maybe it’s the fact that Snowchester is on the shore, a part of him starts grasping at straws. Tubbo has been awfully enamored with the water as of la-
He’s startled out of his thoughts when his shovel strikes something hard. Something wooden.
Something buried.
“Ooh, buried treasure!” Tubbo enthuses from where he’s come to stand at Ranboo’s side. “C’mon, big man, open it!”
Ranboo rolls his eyes, smiling, and he moves to dig out more of the chest until he can find purchase on its latch. Finally, the thing swings open with… less of a creak than he was expecting. That must mean it was buried recently, right?
But who would want to bury… “Is that a fur coat?” he asks, removing the only thing inside the chest.
“No,” Tubbo says. It sounds like he’s fighting back a tremble in his voice, but he can’t keep his hand from shaking as it reaches out to the soft, brown fur in Ranboo’s hands. He pauses, as if waiting for permission to touch it. “It’s a sealskin.”
Ranboo hands it over to Tubbo, who clutches it to his chest like it’s been woven from gold. He buries his face in the fur, taking a deep breath. “Are you- Tubbo, are you crying?”
“No,” he says weakly. Then, quieter, “it smells like alcohol. And dirt.”
“I’m sorry?” Ranboo tries. He’s not… he’s not entirely sure what to do when your friend starts crying into a foul-smelling fur coat.
Tubbo finally removes his face from the fur so he can just… stare at it. “I can’t believe it was here the whole time,” he whispers, and then, he looks back up to Ranboo. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he answers, entirely lost. But… Tubbo’s never responded well to pushing. And right now, Tubbo looks like he might break if Ranboo pushes. He doesn’t know what he’d do if Tubbo broke.
So he doesn’t mention when Tubbo spends the rest of the day with the fur around his shoulders. He doesn’t mention it when he arrives to Snowchester the next day to find no sign of Tubbo, but nothing out of place. Nothing to indicate something bad happened to him. The only thing amiss is that there’s a seal in the water where there usually isn’t- Ranboo didn’t know Snowchester even had seals- but it seems to be enjoying itself just fine.
He does mention, however, when he realizes that Tubbo’s cheeks look pinker than usual. “Do you have another fever?” he asks. Without thinking, he presses his hand to Tubbo’s forehead.
Nothing.
“Nope!” Tubbo chirps. “I feel just fine, actually. Haven’t coughed once in the past week! It’s all that sea air, it’s done me some good.”
“I’m glad, Tubbo,” he smiles.
They spend the rest of the day working on the Bee n’ Boo, and then they spend the evening in its half-finished lobby discussing the new tax Eret is apparently putting in place.
“We could just… get married,” Tubbo suggests at once point.
“I’m sorry?” Ranboo asks.
Tubbo’s cheeks are flushed pink, his eyes trained on the table. His fingers play with the sealskin fur that hasn’t left his shoulders since they found it a week ago. “We could get married. For the tax benefits.”
“I…” Ranboo stops. Thinks about it. He thinks about the way his heart warms whenever he sees Tubbo, and how much time they spend together. He’s not sure when it happened, but Tubbo and their son are the most important people in his life. It… it wouldn’t hurt to make that official. “Maybe you’re onto something,” Ranboo admits, and he can’t help but smile when Tubbo beams at him.
Tubbo nods. “I always am, bossman.”
By the end of the night, they’ve gotten their hands on all the right documents to make everything nice and squared away and legal.
Somewhere in there, Tommy dies, and Ranboo spends the next week and a half making sure neither he nor Tubbo fall apart. Grief is heavy, and he finds his husband more often than not staring at nothing with his hands fisted in the fur of his sealskin coat like it’s the only thing holding him together.
So Ranboo fills in where the coat can’t, and he wraps his arms around him.
After that, Tommy comes back from the dead. When he hears that Tubbo is married, his eyes go from the coat around his shoulders to his hand in Ranboo’s, and his eyes narrow.
When Ranboo makes his way up to Michael’s room, later that same night, to let them all know that dinner’s ready, he can’t help but overhear a snippet of conversation:
“He hasn’t tried to take it or anything?” Tommy’s voice, stern and worried.
“No, Tommy, he found it for me. He gave it back. ”
“So that’s why you married him?”
“It’s what gave me the idea, but it’s not the reason . I married him because he’s important to me, big man. He’s not my brother, like you. It’s.. it’s different than that. We’re different than that.”
There’s a long pause as Tommy considers his next words. “Alright, Tubso. If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Ranboo pauses, and decides to give them a few more minutes.
-
“Tubbo! Tubbo, my man!” crows recently-revived revolutionary-slash-terrorist Wilbur Soot, much, much later. “You’ve been running this place? You are not dressed like a president, man! I thought I gave you a- wait.”
Wilbur stops entirely in his tracks, staring. Analyzing. The resulting silence seems to last an eternity, broken only by the sound of Wilbur’s boots on the glass as he takes a few steps forward so he can better examine Tubbo. Ranboo has to resist the urge to step in between them.
Wilbur’s eyes light up with epiphany. “You’ve found your skin!”
Mutely, Tubbo shakes his head.
“No?” he hums. “Someone else found it for you? Can I ask who the lucky suitor is?”
Tubbo opens his mouth, but no sound comes out. Ranboo finally gives in and steps closer to Tubbo so he can link their hands together.
Wilbur watches the interaction with interest. “The new guy? You really know how to pick ‘em, Tubbo!” The smile he flashes to Tubbo is genuine, and for a moment Ranboo can almost picture what kind of man he was before he broke. But then, his eyes slide over to Ranboo, and there’s something dangerous in their glint. “You and I are going to have to have a talk later, I hope you know that.”
Ranboo’s throat goes dry. “Sure. I can, uh. I can probably pencil you in somewhere.”
“Perfect,” Wilbur chirps, and Ranboo mentally prepares himself for the shovel talk of a lifetime.